Just to be Among the Breathing, Reeling of the World

Art first, ask questions later

the kids do a bit of collaborative drawing

In September, I went to our daughter’s last ever Back-to-School night, since she will be graduating this spring. I am a sucker for the beginning of a school year, freshly sharpened pencils, notebooks, a new glue stick, (yes, I realize this school supplies list dates me), and I absorbed it all: the squeak of sneakers on waxed hallway floors, the posters advertising new clubs. If my life hadn’t been composed of itinerant art projects, teaching residencies and nonprofit work, I would dearly have loved having my own classroom.

I listened as one teacher described the cell phone policy in his room. Kids are allowed to keep their phones — he made the point that we’ve all got to figure out how to use them wisely, so it doesn’t make sense to confiscate them. He uses a system of signage that indicates when it’s okay to have phones out (YES TECH) and when to put them away, (NO TECH). If a student doesn’t heed the “no tech” signal, he mentions it to them, and then the next warning requires the student to slip their phone into a pouch that rests on the desk. It’s tough enough work for a teacher to deliver a killer lesson with everybody looking on in rapt attention - policing individual kids and their devices is a serious added burden and it’s why some teachers give up on enforcement altogether. This fall, two Portland high schools implemented no-phone policies that require kids to deposit their phones at the beginning of each day into a little pouch called a Yondr — (hey, where’s your attention? It’s out yonder, where we’re searching for the missing E). Apparently the banning of phones during school hours is happening around the world, (and in some countries, has already been happening for awhile).¹ Kids say they’re relieved to be able to concentrate on listening and learning in school, and they’re plenty clear about what they need.²

But I’m still thinking of that student’s phone tucked into a pouch on his desk, and how (unless he’s been instructed to silence it) it is a Chekov’s gun above the mantle — if it’s left there, it’s part of the story and it’s gonna vibrate. But even if it doesn’t vibrate, it’s like vibrating anyway, you know? It still saps some of our attention at some kind of cellular level. And when phones are in our hands, eyes on screens, we are entering a tacit kind of agreement to fly other places while being in the same classroom/living room/bus train/plane/taxi/airport. We are together with our bodies, but with the swipe of a thumb, our brains step onto a platform that takes each of us to a different place: to a synchronized dance, or to Iceland, where our friend is soaking in a hot springs, or to a thread in an amplified political argument. We go to footage of a January 6th breach of the Capitol building then to a video of a cat jumping backwards from a cucumber followed by an ad about gun control from a Sandyhook dad whose first grade child was shot to death on the day he was supposed to make gingerbread houses and then a demo of how to apply wrinkle-reducing eye make-up. Maybe we finish with a video of a raggedy stray dog who is taken in, given a bath, fed warm food and then trots around, shiny-coated and happy. We travel all over the place and often enough, after we come back to ourselves, we discover that we didn’t do the thing we’d intended to do when we picked up the phone in the first place. So we begin again: Step onto platform/different cat backwards/Sandyhook ad, a mom this time/a cow saved from a slaughterhouse and released into a field where it frolics on grass for the first time in its life.

I haven’t talked to anybody (friends, workmates, high school kids) that is totally happy with their habits when it comes to screen usage, and the sometimes jittery, multi-tasking effects it has on the brain. When we are connected to a smartphone by an invisible tether, we are never wholly present. We are waiting to receive something or getting ready to send something or researching something we don’t know but won’t remember anyway. In a recent interview³ with Ezra Klein, the writer Zadie Smith talked about how she owned a smartphone for about 3 months in 2008 and then threw it over her left shoulder and never looked back, (okay, I don’t know that it was actually thrown, but safe to say she decided she didn’t want one). She calls phones a “Behavior Modification System” that tells us where to put our focus each day, and says when she gets on a train and looks down the corridor past rows of people stretching back a half mile, there isn’t a single person looking up. “The effect on people’s ability to attend,” she says, “has been radical.” She says “it’s about capture,” and says that it’s been perilously successful. It has been total.⁴

Smith allows that not having a phone has resulted in some seriously inconvenient moments, like when traveling, for example, but that even when something has gone truly sideways and impacted a vacation, whatever has unfolded has not been more damaging to her than it would be to have a phone. That’s some strong stuff, and I found myself thinking about it a lot these past days. The idea of the erosion of our ability to attend to a thing. To give it our full consideration. What if Zadie Smith (a self-described television addict) had decided to keep her phone after all and then spent more time scrolling than say, writing The Fraud or White Teeth. What books aren’t written and what art isn’t made, all because of dumb phones? How do we quantify that loss? I don’t know the answer, but I do want to live the question.⁵

We closed the Street Books library this past week for a staff rest, and I used the time to go off-screen, clean my little studio, and listen to a new album by the artist Nathaniel Russell,⁶ (played on a LOVE turntable painted by the artist Larry Yes⁷). I also listened to Claire Dederer’s⁸ Love and Trouble on audiobook and then read Colored Television by Danzy Senna⁹. It felt like excellent company to be surrounded by art and words. Nathaniel Russell has a line in the song “Wish I Was Born an Animal” that goes:

I found a picture in a pocket of a coat I hadn't worn for a year 
It felt good just to listen just to look, just to be alive and 
Just to be among the breathing reeling of the world..

I first discovered Russell’s work when I was wandering with my friend Diana in the central library in Austin, Texas. His book of fake fliers is one of the funniest things I’ve encountered, and I want to use it as inspiration for this month’s Truth & Dare.

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Truth: Write about a moment in time like the one N. Russell describes after finding a picture in the pocket of his coat, (when it felt good just to be alive). Infuse your sentences with as much detail as possible. If you’ve got fall leaves, make ‘em crispy.

Dare: Create an odd flier in the style of N. Russell (collage, sharpie marker, photo, whatever medium you like). Staple it to the telephone pole nearest your house and check on it over a week or two. Not feeling particularly weird? Make an encouraging banner instead, (assignment #63 in the Learning to Love You More project¹⁰).

Thanks as always for reading this far. Outside the sun is golden and Maxwell the Scrubjay has just made short work of the peanuts on the Peanut Board. He has tucked them in the rain gutter and under the leaf pile at the school across the street. Things are looking good. Wherever you are, take good care.

1. When It Comes to Banning Smartphones from Schools, What Really Works? (From “Reasons to be Cheerful”)

2. What kids say they need: community, art, mental health supports and things like exercise, sports programs, books/audiobooks and outdoor spaces like parks

3. Ezra Klein / Zadie Smith interview

4. She also mentions the book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman’s look on the introduction of television back in the day, and its corrosive effect on politics and public discourse

5. Thank you, Ranier Maria Rilke: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

6. Nathaniel Russell’s website and his fake fliers page, which you should definitely look at

7. Larry Yes is the best. Buy his art and support his work

8. Claire Dederer’s website

9. I love the wry humor and sharp observations about human nature in Senna’s Colored Television

10. I was able to submit several writing assignments during the time this project was still running, which was fun, but even though it’s not active now, all the assignments are still up and there are some great ones